Trump says he’ll have another meeting with Putin, again calls media ‘enemy of the people’

Trump says he’ll have another meeting with Putin, again calls media ‘enemy of the people’

File: Donald Trump in January of 2017. Image courtesy CNN.

By Jeremy Diamond, CNN

President Donald Trump said Thursday he is “looking forward” to meeting again with Russian President Vladimir Putin to “begin implementing” issues they discussed during their summit earlier this week.

Trump, who touched off a major political controversy with his embrace of Putin in Helsinki, Finland, accused the news media — which he again dubbed the “enemy of the people” — of distorting the summit and pining for a confrontation between the US and Russia.

In a series of tweets Thursday morning, Trump argued his summit with Putin “was a great success.”

“The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Trump said. “I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more.”

“There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems…but they can ALL be solved!” Trump tweeted.

Putin has signaled in the wake of his summit with Trump that he and the US President reached several agreements, but neither Trump nor the White House have confirmed any substantive agreements between the two countries.

Trump faced criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike in the wake of his summit with Putin after he refused to back the US intelligence community’s assessment of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election during a joint news conference with Putin, instead touting Putin’s strong denials.

Trump subsequently said he misspoke, but has not acknowledged that he repeatedly put the US intelligence community’s assessment and Putin’s denials on the same footing.